Hours after denying a request for the results of a recent vote, the South Dakota High School Activities Association reversed itself and agreed to allow partial access to school district ballots.

But executive director Wayne Carney said SDHSAA wouldn't release that information digitally. Instead, he said anyone interested in reviewing the election would need to come to the SDHSAA office in Pierre and examine the ballots themselves.

"You can take all those ballots and you can go through them and you can see how each school voted," Carney said Monday afternoon.

That was a different answer than Carney had given late Monday morning. At that time, he said people interested in seeing how school districts voted could look at the school board minutes for each of the 180 schools in the activities association.

"(If) an individual would like to go to the websites of the individual member schools to see how they cast their ballots, they are certainly welcome to do that," Carney said Monday morning.

Carney agreed to give access to the ballots shortly after the Argus Leader published an article about his refusal of the information request. He said the only thing that had changed since the morning refusal was he had "consulted with our attorney for sure."

But while Carney agreed to allow access to the ballots, he said the association wouldn't release its tabulation of the results. Members of the public would have to do that themselves.

"We've checked with our attorney, and that particular document, they say, is not public information. That's a document that was used for our use in our office, and it's not shared with anyone," Carney said.

David Bordewyk, general manager of the South Dakota Newspaper Association, said he didn't get why SDHSAA might hesitate to release the results. But he said allowing access to the ballots was a good step.

"It's great that now they've taken this half-step here," Bordewyk said, calling it "minimally compliant" with open records law.

Earlier this month, the activities association announced that 97 schools had voted for a reorganization that would have given a bigger role on its board to Sioux Falls and Rapid City. The 59.87 percent in favor was a single vote short of success.

Carney's reversal about public access to the ballots comes after a fierce debate earlier this year about SDHSAA's transparency. The South Dakota Legislature passed a new law in March applying open government laws to SDHSAA -- though that law doesn't take effect until July 1.

Before Carney agreed to allow access to the ballots, state Sen. Corey Brown said he was disappointed in the lack of transparency.

"This last year the Legislature had tried to make it clear that we felt additional transparency for that organization was probably a good thing," said Brown, a Republican from Gettysburg and the president pro tempore of the state Senate. "I'm not very happy to see them take a course of action that appears contrary to that."

At the time, Carney said the ballots should be private.

"It's like you voting for president, and then somebody asks when you come out, 'Could you please release how everybody voted?'" Carney said. "When people voted on constitutional amendments and board members, that was not information that, at least in the time I've been here or the time before I've been in the office, was released to the public."

Bordewyk disagreed.

"To say that somehow this vote should be kept confidential or secret, it doesn't make any sense," said Bordewyk, who lobbied for the bill applying open government rules to the SDHSAA. "It's not like you or I going into a poll and voting personally. That is a secret ballot, but when school districts vote, that's a public decision. The activities association is simply compiling those results, so why not make those compiled results public?"